The Way Things Were (16 page)

And then, thirty-six hours after it began, the raid was over. Not too much material damage: just two carved silver mirrors and a cigarette box, made for Toby’s father in England, mysteriously missing.

But there was immaterial damage, such as the tone Toby took with Maniraja after the raid.

He had come down to Kalasuryaketu on Toby’s request. He drove a Toyota, which, in those days of deprivation, was as good as a Bentley, and he wore a beautiful suit. But under those fine clothes, he was a tough-talking, brass-balled business type. He spoke to the inspector as he ought to have been spoken to.

‘Oh, Mr Chawla, did you always want to work for the tax department?’

‘No, actually, sir,’ wheedle wheedle, ‘I was a vet at first.’

‘Oh, a vet! How interesting. And why did you stop being a vet and come to work here? Was it the money . . .’

‘No, no, sir, how you talking. I’m only a poor man trying to do my job under great pressure.’

‘Oh ho, well, I must tell my friend, Dikshit who is the head of the Tax Department, to take some of the pressure off. Perhaps to take it off completely.’

‘Oh, Mr Dikshit, your friend?’

‘Very close friend. Like a brother. And such an honourable man. Hates corruption, in all its forms. Especially, harassment . . .’

‘Yes, yes. We, of course, know your family. Big factories. Cars, sweets, coal.’

‘Yes, we’ve had the privilege of having your boys over.’

‘How come you here, Mr Maniraja?’

‘Bas, passing through the area. On my way to Delhi. My friend Ismail Mujib, great friend, you know . . .’

‘Who does not know Ismail Mujib?’

And so, it continued, the dialectic of the influential and the influenced, flowing easily to a place of rest and mutual understanding.

It did not end the raid, but a new tone was set. Samosas and tea would arrive frequently from the bazaar. Oil-daubed newspapers over Wedgwood plates bearing the Kalasuryaketu crest. An inky blue Skanda astride his peacock. In the background was the K
ā
la | s
ū
rya, which, in myth, was the sun at the end of Time.

‘Very grateful to you, old boy,’ Uma heard Toby say to Maniraja once the taxmen had left. ‘I mean, you know . . . people of your world . . . I would never have known how to speak to them.’

Ah, the errors of judgement we make! And, tragically, in those early days of a relationship, there is no distinction between behaviour that is out of character and that which seems to reveal true character. Unluckily for Toby, with his sister there by his side – a cruder, more thankless reflection of himself – Uma felt she saw her new husband for what he really was: a foolish ineffectual snob.

‘It was after the raid,’ Skanda says, ‘that my mother felt sure she was in trouble with my father.’

‘She would tell
you
these things?’ Gauri asks in disbelief.

‘She always told me everything. And it was my misfortune that I never forgot a word.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Why didn’t you do anything then?”’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said, “How could I? I was married barely a few months. I had just escaped the clutches of your evil nani. I was newly pregnant with you. I had to wait it out.”’

They are in the flat, where the time is no longer stopped at his arrival from Geneva. It has made one of those sudden leaps that makes you sit up. ‘A change in the weather’, Proust tells us, ‘is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew.’ Never is this more true than with the rains, which arrive like a person arriving, and, one hour to the next, everything is altered: the character of the heat; the quality of the light; the colour and smell of the earth. And there are things that lie on one side of the rainy breach: Theo, Skype, his father’s ashes, the white light, the dry heat; on the other: Gauri, and Gauri alone: and there are things that knit the time together: Sanskrit and The Birth.

‘But it should not have affected you,’ Gauri says, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. ‘Kartik, you know, asked me the other day if I loved his
deddy
. “Tum mere papa se pyaar karte ho.” “Absolutely not,” I told him. “Bilkul nahin.” But then I tempered it quickly by saying, “It’s because I love you so much, Kartik; I have no space in my heart for anyone else but you.” He liked that. And, your mother, did she mitigate what she said? To make you know that even if she no longer loved
deddy
dearest, she still loved you?’

‘All the time. But because there was so much of him in me, it was impossible for me not to see the connection, between myself and the man she came to loathe.’

‘Loathe is too strong a word, surely.’

‘It
was
loathing, Gauri. I’ll tell you why: because
she
left, and he never recovered. When you cause pain to those weaker than you, the guilt turns to loathing. Into a most secret and profound loathing, for we can never name it as such. We explain it away in other terms, but we, and we alone, know it to be the most animal of all hatreds: our hatred of weakness.’

‘So what then?’ Gauri asks, after a pause. ‘Was it all just downhill after that?’

‘No, no, not at all. Quite the opposite. The raid was put down to a bad patch at a bad time, and halcyon days followed.
The years
, my father would say,
when the days went by like leaves falling from a tree.
The years of babies and brunches and long summer holidays. My father, with his textbook to write, had endless amounts of time for us. There were zoos, and birthday parties, and a great sleep in Delhi. I can’t tell if it was because I was a child or whether those were, in fact, sleepy days . . .’

‘They were sleepy days. But not politically, mind you. You were too young to remember . . .’

‘What year were you born in?’

‘Will you still love me if I tell you?’

‘I’ll love you more.’

‘1970. And you? Two thousand and . . . ?’

‘Shut up. 1976.’

‘A baby! And your sister?’

‘1978, 13 April. The day the trouble in Punjab began.’

‘Early for that, no? Punjab didn’t get going till much later. I remember. Not till 1982, at least.’

‘No, no. 1978, 13 April. It may have been a speck on the horizon, but that was the day Bhindranwale, then still an unknown village priest propped up by the Congress, clashed with the Nirankaris. That strife between the priest and the heterodoxy: that was the true beginning of the Punjab problem. That was when the ball was set rolling. Trust me, I know: Punjab was another slow fuse in our lives.’

‘And when was it over?’

‘Punjab?’

‘No. The relationship. Your parents.’

‘Hard to say exactly when.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘Slowly. There was an incident concerning my uncle I.P. in 1984; a long separation; my father leaving for Kalasuryaketu . . .’

‘Then Europe?’

‘No, that was later, and Gauri . . .’ he says, and stops.

The rain is too loud for him to continue.

In 1978, the trouble in Punjab was still remote. After the boredom of the Emergency – and yes: that is what it became: interminable: like a monsoon or war without end . . . And Tripathi had been wrong: after the initial disruption to their lives, the rich – though some of their relations remained in jail – were hardly affected. It was the poor who felt the sharp edge of the family planning programmes, of the forcible sterilization, of the midnight vans, of the tyrannical beautification programmes (read: slum clearance). When, in the election of 1977, they had the chance to express their anger, they threw Mrs Gandhi and her horn-rimmed son out.

Toby was at the Kumbh, with Tripathi and Baba ji, a roguish ascetic, full of yoga and politics, when elections were announced. It was the famous Kumbh of 1977; the entire press corps, forbidden under censorship from writing political stories, was in Allahabad. And, unbeknownst to them, Mrs Gandhi had come too. It was there over the loudspeaker that she, in her thin voice, announced the elections that would put an end to her Emergency.

A few months later, on the night of the results, Uma and Toby, newly moved into their flat, newly parents, took Skanda in their arms and drove down to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in an old black Fiat. It was a beautiful March night and thousands had gathered outside the
Times of India
building, where, on black billboards, the results were posted liked cricket scores. There, they found friends, and so many other people besides that traffic on the arterial street had stopped. And when, close to dawn, it became clear Mrs Gandhi and her son were going to lose their own seats, a roar went up from the street. Just before the first light, dancers began to appear, with drums about their necks, and people had tears in their eyes. Never before, or indeed again, had an election been so much about the freedoms on which the modern nation was founded, and never before had the people spoken so completely in one voice. They – Isha, Viski, Uma and Toby – returned at 5 a.m. to Fatehkot House to find the Brigadier and his wife listening to the BBC on a shortwave radio. Even Deep Fatehkotia, not usually one to be swept up in a public festivity, could not contain herself. She looked her son-in-law in the eye and said, ‘Toby saab, you must know my general contempt for the Indian public. But today, I hand it to them: we must salute the Indian voter.’

And, on hearing this, the younger generation found themselves full of emotion, for there was such innocence that night, innocence as there had not been since Mrs Gandhi’s father first roused a sleeping nation to light and freedom. Their generation had never known anything like it. They were people stranded between the spoilt hope of Independence and the still distant promise of Liberalization. And, though more isolated than their parents, they were also ironically the most colonized: the first to lose language and faith and culture, the first to feel the certainties of tribe and community crumble about them. But that night – the night Mrs Gandhi and her son lost the election – was their night and they exulted, even if briefly, in the hope it had restored in them.

A few weeks later, Uma discovered she was pregnant again.

The general fog that lies over Delhi brings to this most fragmented of cities a surprising unity.

The cities within the city, each endowed with an island mentality, merge magically into an urban whole, achieving what no number of flyovers and metro lines have been able to. In this new harmony, temporary and unclean, the glittering glass offices of Gurgaon, their aircraft warning lights flashing red in the haze, are united with low-lying gated colonies to the south, east and west. These, with their bright markets and bald communal gardens, and the occasional tomb of a forgotten medieval official, are, in turn, stitched together with the radial sprawl of Lutyens’ city.

Here the murk has sunk deepest. Tonight, the British city, with its low domes and bungalows, is like a submerged necropolis. The rickshaws glide along its streets, with that stealthy sense of purpose with which single-beam submersibles in documentary films explore the ocean floor; the yellow streetlights, buried in the canopies of trees, have the nested glow, at once inviting and dangerous, of marine wonders behind screens of sharp coral; and, everywhere, the dense cold air, sulphurous and full of particles, closes over old wounds. Even where the scar tissue runs deepest, the line between the British city and the Muslim town to its north, where the escapees of one upheaval came to populate the abandoned places of another, the fog, easy and billowing, brings a feeling of continuity, at once even-handed and insensitive, like the blanketing hush of a first snow, like curfew in Srinagar.

The house on Curzon Road, down a long tree-darkened avenue at the heart of the British city, shows its wounds too.

A cement scar has appeared across the full length of its pale yellow facade. It is visible from the street. Long, saw-toothed and smiling.

‘Hai, Jaanu!’ Gauri says, ‘Where have you brought me? And on such a night . . .’

At the gate, men, with an exaggerated concern for the cold, stand around a cement dish, from which a good fire climbs high into the murk. On seeing the car one pries himself away from the orange warmth. A face, small and ravaged, eyes clouded. They appear bluish-white behind their bifocal lenses till the driver of the car, always quicker to take offense than the owner, strikes fear into them. Grovelling apologies; anger ricocheting among the men huddled by the fire; and, at last, the house’s green gates fly open. Shelves of fog rise in sudden alarm, stumble along the red sandstone of the drive and cascade down to some further place of rest. The car’s beams chase off the remaining wisps of fog to reveal a scene of devastation.

‘What were you saying?’

‘Tch, tch, tch! Now look at this!’

The white headlights sweep over an arcade of palms. They are ranged around the red sandstone rim of a central oval whose wet earth is bare and upturned, like a freshly ploughed field. Etched blackly onto the pale trunks of the colonnading palms are terms of abuse and the promises of lovers. The capitals of the palms, frayed and burnt brown in the acid winter air, overlook a fountain whose basins are dusty and dry, its Egyptian needle a shattered stump. An unplastered brick wall, perpendicular and precise, comes from one edge of the property to cleave the central basin of the fountain unevenly in two. The wall climbs the house’s shallow steps, spoiling the symmetry of its pillared entrance, and plunges deep into the hulking shell of the Lutyens mansion.

Standing outside, Gauri says, ‘This is your real massi’s house?’

‘Real massi. Isha massi. Mother’s sister.’

‘They had some family feud or what?’

‘Brothers. Property.’

‘Typical, no? Wherever money’s involved. When did you last come here?’

‘I virtually grew up here, Gauri; I was here for countless Holis and Diwalis and birthday parties, but I haven’t been back in – what?! – twenty years.’

‘Twenty years! So long. How come?’

‘Just . . . I don’t know. We drifted apart, I guess.’

‘And, out of the blue, she called you, this Isha massi of yours?’